When calling for contributions, guide contributors by sharing the bad examples, not the good, because they show what you don’t want but don’t tightly constrain creativity.

“When they saw the quality, everyone settled down,” Gove said. “It’s actually a little cheaper so people warmed up pretty quickly. We just have to get used to the three stripes as opposed to the swoosh.

Life becomes more and more like The Space Merchants.

Why can’t I search within the files in the “resources” area of a ctools site? 90% of professors use Ctools only to upload course materials, so this seems like a crucial feature.

Another gem:

When contacted by The News via e-mail on Thursday afternoon, a representative of Craig’s List asked for a link to the ad and asked that questions be submitted by e-mail. The representative didn’t respond to a second e-mail asking to be contacted by phone. The online bulletin board service is user-monitored, with anyone able to flag questionable postings for deletion.

Two points,

1. The News didn’t link to the post in their first email.
2. Maybe the Craigslist reply isn’t clear, but they want to answer questions by EMAIL. Not by phone. That you can do journalism via email doesn’t seem to connect.

Adam Holland mentioned today that it’s getting harder to write predictive science fiction  because time between invention and adoption has decreased massively in the last 100 years.

Dan Levy’s copy of the WSJ had an article on tracking migration patterns with cellphones. How many people = one phone?

Whack-a-mole: a viable methodology for dealing with serious problems.

Like many power companies in the area, Consolidated Edison played whack-a-mole to keep up with power failures, though it said it had plenty of slack capacity. (nyt)

Backyard Post is a city directory edited by… editors that are paid moneys. Not as automated as EveryBlock, not as text-heavy as ArborWiki. William Hartnett’s “glorified spreadsheet“.

Alternative newspapers are being read by suburbia sez some (probably methodologically unsound) report.

Rob Curley responds to a WSJ article on his “‘Hyperlocal’ flop” — that geeks can and do know neighborhoods.

A different response: the failure is in the business model, not in real journalism. On the folly of local-local.

Andrea Calderaro of Caltech is using European and other demographic information to map the digital divide worldwide, the first such project. Follow up is asking how this will affect bottom-up political participation. All work is quantitative, based off survey  questions he didn’t write; he’s not actually asking people how they use technologies or investigating how they don’t. I wonder how much of the Real will be reflected in his report; excited to read it, in any case.

Big Pictures from Boston.com

Two issues with the article:

1. They didn’t talk to any restaurants that still sell bottled water (here are more than 150, along with contact information)
2. For a viewpoint from the bottled water industry association, they copy-and-pasted a quote from their website:
   

   “The bottled water industry has an outstanding record and solid commitment to environmental stewardship and is a leader in the food and beverage industry in reducing its environmental footprint, while at the same time delivering the healthful value of bottled water to thirsty consumers,” the association says on its Web site.

Which is stellar journalism.

From the same report:

Carvin uses a service, Audlink.com, to record from his mobile phone directly onto the web. It doesn’t automatically create enclosures or an RSS feed, so the podcast is not automatic, but it’s a useful too. He also uses a tool called audioblogger.com which enables the blogger to ‘call in’ to their blog and post audio files directly on it.

That was 2005; both have failed. http://www.audioblogger.com is an Apache hello page.  Livejournal does http://www.livejournal.com/voicepost/

What is Berkman doing to help with the Digital Divide? Not clear. OLPC? Complaining about the situation? (C Nesson is doing something in Jamaica)

Photos of a bulk room serving ~20 people:

A library of food?

It’s much easier to eat new things if they’re readily at hand, in large quantities.

(hm, a bit blurry)